Question

I’m often having code written as follows

try:
  self.title = item.title().content.string
except AttributeError, e:
  self.title = None

---

Is there a quicker way of dealing with this? a one-liner?

Answer 1

What exceptions are you getting from item.title()? The bare except (horrible practice!) doesn’t tell us. If it’s an AttributeError (where item doesn’t have a title method, for example),

self.title = getattr(item, 'title', lambda: None)()

might be the one-liner you seek (but performance won’t be enormously different, mind you;-).

Edit: as the OP entirely changed the question (it was originally just using self.title(), it’s now using self.title().content.string, and does specifically catch AttributeError rather than using a bare except), the previous version of this answer of course doesn’t apply any more. The proper answer now is: attempting a one-liner is an absurd approach, when the chain of attribute references &c keeps growing longer and longer (how many will there be next time, nine? Since they jumped from one to three with the first edit…;-).

And with no idea of which of the many elementary operations expressed by that long, Law of Demeter-scoffing chain of references might raise the AttributeError, any attempt at optimization would be flying rather blind, too.